A new job posting from EA and Maxis suggests The Sims 5 will be free-to-play from the start, whenever the life-sim launches at some point in the distant future (thanks, Kotaku). The job posting is for a head of monetization and marketplace for Project Rene, The Sims 5’s codename, and the job description also suggests a few changes may be coming to how the series works.
“Own Project Rene’s in-game marketplace of content and ugc [user-generated content] (free and paid), and manage a data-informed player-centric player purchase journey – maximizing value to players, optimizing player spend patterns, and minimizing player churn,” the first bullet point in the description reads.
The second point says the candidate will oversee pricing for all content in “this free-to-enter” game. It sounds a lot like the model EA switched to for The Sims 4, where the base game is free, and additional content – expansions, themed items, and so on – comes at a cost.
How much you’ll get in the free part remains to be seen, since The Sims 5 is still very early in development.
The “in-game marketplace” portion has some fans thinking Maxis has new plans for how you access new items and the like in the game. The Sims 4 directs you to the marketplace associated with your platform – Steam, for example, or EA’s Origin store. A marketplace integrated directly into the game would certainly be more convenient and may make it easier for EA to offer specific pieces and types of content as well, including custom content, creations and mods that users build that normally live on fan sites and have to be installed manually.
While The Sims 5 is still a ways away, Maxis is gearing up to release the latest Sims 4 expansion, Horse Ranch, in July 2023.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
